Posted
by
samzenpuson Friday March 26, 2010 @12:21PM
from the smallest-things dept.

The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has come up with an unusual way of saving money: changing their email font. The school expects to use 30% less ink by switching from Arial to Century Gothic. From the article: "Diane Blohowiak is the school's director of computing. She says the new font uses about 30 percent less ink than the previous one. That could add up to real savings, since the cost of printer ink works out to about $10,000 per gallon. Blohowiak says the decision is part of the school's five-year plan to go green. She tells Wisconsin Public Radio it's great that a change that's eco-friendly also saves money."

Next up - saving electricity by using smaller fonts on the computer screens.

...of course that wouldn't work given that smaller fonts would mean fewer dark foreground pixels and more bright background pixels. Switching from white backgrounds to gray backgrounds would be more likely to have any impact (assuming that modern monitors use more electricity when displaying bright images).

What no one seems to have brought up is that while Century Gothic uses less ink than Arial, it also takes up more space (unless

Thanks for the technical help but... I really hate it when people take a perfectly weak joke post and then try to make it sensible by adding some bit of erudition or a fact or two. It ruins whatever humorous implications that were originally present, minimal though they be.

Are you serious about the joking? I can see no real evidence in the quoted report that it's meant to be less than serious. Also, the fact that this is being done for the sake of greenitude pretty definitively points in a contrary direction. People who are really into the green thing usually lack a sense of humor, and are incapable of making jokes—especially about their ideology. They are also quite likely to believe that measures like this work.

Well I was joking. I mean, the whole concept is pretty bizarre and rather humorous. You're right, some of the greenies are wound up tighter than an eight day clock but here at Slashdot - well, we're a pretty loose lot (or to use a more common vernacular, we're 'loosers').

Sigh. I think I'll just shut up now and maybe go for a walk - the coffee obviously isn't helping much.

According to that, the negligible power difference is actually in favor of showing white images on LCDs in most cases. It makes sense that unless the screen dims when showing dark colors (as you see on some TVs), there is extra effort required to change the color from its natural state, light, to dark.

With CRTs, the opposite would be true. Black should require less power than white.

That depends on what type of LCD panel it is. TN (twisted nematic) panels (most common type in cheaper displays) are clear in their off state and darken when voltage is applied, but VA (vertical alignment) panels are the exact opposite.

...of course that wouldn't work given that smaller fonts would mean fewer dark foreground pixels and more bright background pixels. Switching from white backgrounds to gray backgrounds would be more likely to have any impact (assuming that modern monitors use more electricity when displaying bright images).

LCD's use ever-so-slightly more power for dark than they do for bright. The backlight is always-on, and the LCD goes active to block out that light for dark spots, passive for bright spots. White backgr

They will probably save money because paper is significantly cheaper than ink... and if they are printing the emails, it must surely be for record keeping... so recycling / landfill space isn't as much an issue.

I worked in a DoD office a few years ago that was run by a Colonel who had all of his emails printed out in triplicate (one for his office, one for home, and one to file) by his secretary. He never read any of his email on his computer.

It's not funny people! My boss used to do the same! Only thing is he told me it's a paper trail used to cover his ass in case something goes wrong. And usually things did go wrong. Running Windows was sometimes the cause...

It's not nearly as stupid as it sounds! Years ago, I was an assistant prosecutor. On my first day, somebody told me horror stories about a previous DA. The first lesson you learned was, when the DA told you to dismiss somebody's DUI charge, get the order in writing. The SECOND lesson you learned was, make a copy of that writing and take it home and lock it in your safe.
The boss man is ALWAYS in ultimate control of the contents of the office computer system. If he wants to make an e-mail disappear (for all practical purposes, short of a lawsuit and discovery ordered by a judge in a lawsuit), he can.
Now, triplicate is a bit much, and I'd be more selective about which e-mails I really need hard copies of, but the idea of printing out the e-mail and taking it home so nobody can accuse you later of having acted on your own? That's just a good idea.

Have you worked at a school? I do, and I run all the labs at a community college. These people are the villains of the forest. I'm not sure how much we spent per year on paper, but the local school district here (have a good friend who is a sys admin there) says they spend over 80k on paper every year - that's like 2 employees at the wages they pay people.

I do know they bring paper here on huge pallets in massive semi trucks driven here by Georgia Pacific - that's usually a sigh that you have a problem.

E-mail should stay on e-lectronic media! Unless there is a genuine purpose to have a printed copy of an email, don't print it. Digital archives are much more cost effective than that overflowing file cabinet anyway.

There are lots of reason why I print e-mails. For example, if I intent to discuss it in a meeting and don't want to lug my laptop with me and fart about with a projector. Also, I personally find it easier to read from a printout for long e-mails especially when I want to highlight parts of it or have it handy while writing another e-mail and especially when we are forced to use the steaming pile of crap that is Lotus Notes as an e-mail client.

Yeah, go tell it to my IT department and they will politely tell you to fuck off. Approved devices only. Also, I don't want to push my tablet computer across a conference table so somebody else can read it. Much easier with a piece of paper. And what if I want to print a copy for everybody? Take 5 tablet PCs?

Laser printers use toner, not ink. It's quite possible the article writer does not know the difference, but there is one.Dye sublimation printers also use something commonly referred to as ink, but ink jet printers are much more common.

when i did a year of consulting for a US Army agency years ago, it seemed like almost everyone wanted their own personal printer. most people thought they were too good to share a printer with the 50 other people on the floor. so they probably bought inkjets for all the cry babies who wanted their own printer

It's even worse where I work. Most of the departments *have* workgroup-class laser printers (or huge copy machines with network print capability). Many of the staff just can't be bothered to get off their lazy asses to walk down a hall to their workroom to get their printouts. Yes, it's that simple...:(

That's where you talk to the corporate health and wellness people. Remind them of the recommendations that everyone get up and walk around periodically during the day, and the omnipresence of personal inkjets means people aren't walking.

Suddenly, all those printers will get yanked by the health fascists. Use evil for good.;)

This is probably very close to the truth. The people in question are probably professors, and the way internal politics works in most Universities (I have worked for 3) the professors have most of the power. Since they all want a personal printer, they all get one, but they are the ones in charge of the budget and there is no way they are going to buy a laser printer when they could buy a cheaper inkjet (since "it is almost free"). Since the ink often comes out of a budget that is not theirs (at least not directly), they don't care about on-going costs (nor were they really going to think about them in the first place).

And the professors in question are often older (this affects both eyesight, and comfort with technology), and they are often getting email that needs to be marked up (notes on scientific papers, reviews of their post-doc's work, etc...), and you find that they get in the habit of printing out everything. There are some who are moving to a mostly-digital workflow, but the tools for this are still specialized or not well known in the community (they are just learning about how to use editing notes in Word).

In most Universities the local IT has no power to change any of these, and has to walk a lot of very fine lines politically (while being underpaid for even the normal job). Central IT often can put out edicts, since people there have the ear of the dean, but localized IT has both the responsibility to enforce these edicts, and none of the power to do so.

This is perhaps where something like an iPad could help go towards paperless... but like in Avatar, where they uplink to the bodies for the first time, the scientist slides what he is interested in off his main computer onto a slate, there needs to be tech that facilitates the exchange of "papers" the same way between devices. Without thinking about it, mucking with file formats or email adresses.

This is perhaps where something like an iPad could help go towards paperless.

When you consider the reasons people print their email, a trinket like the iPad is going completely the wrong direction. The people I've known that print their email usually do so for a few reasons:

- Easier for them to read on paper than a monitor- They can easily annotate with corrective marks, shapes, arrows, comments- Collate and file the message away with other paperwork- Just don't like using computers for whatever reason and

The first two would be pretty simple on a table (and add the ability to instantly send someone else a copy).. that is, if you had a tablet with a stylus. I'd like to see someone use their fingers to write notes/annotations on a document. Of course, then you still have the problem that it's around 5x more expensive than just buying your own laser printer;)

For text based websites there's instapaper.com - you use a bookmarklet on the website you want to send to the device (it's even easier than del.icio.us - it doesn't ask you any questions, it just does it).

It's not as simple as you'd think (though there is no good reason it shouldn't be simple!).

See -- I work in the ITS department in a college. We strongly discourage the individual departments from purchasing inkjet printers, however, because they're "cheap", and since we're facing huge budget reductions, the departments purchase them anyway. They're then upset at the ink costs, which we warned them about. They're even more pissed when they find out we can't obtain parts to fix their cheap pieces of garbage (let alone that, even if parts were available, our time spent fixing such a POS would make it too expensive). It all boils down to short-term thinking. They *never* take into account how long they'd like the printer to work, and it's total cost of operation. They only see the initial bottom-line.

Until they hit the $30 mark (or less), it won't matter to these people.

Like I said -- they only see the up-front cost. Trying to make them see that such a printer will cost them *far* more in the long run is like trying to convince Glenn Beck that he's wrong -- about *anything*.

Oh, who am I kidding. We've still got professors at my school lecturing with transparencies they produced on typewriters. It's going to be years before the entirety of the faculty is willing to handle paperless communication.

A recent example came up at work recently. We had a design meeting between many people/departments at my work. I had pertinent notes in an email that needed to be at the meeting. The option was to setup a A/V system to display the email then forward copies to everyone, or I could print ten copies and hand them out.

The second option took me less than 10 seconds (including waiting for them to print and walking over to pick them up). During t

My wife worked in the lab of an eminent scientist in college. When he was away at conferences, one of her jobs was to print out all of his e-mails (including personal ones), put them in a Fedex box, and ship them to him.

The built-in PDF reader on my iLiad lets me do that. The device has a built-in Wacom tablet and you can use it to write on a any PDF. It weighs a lot less than a stack of papers too. I've left academia now, but I used it to annotate papers quite a lot while I was a PhD student.

I used to accept digital copies. I stopped, for a lot of reasons: unverifiable "I sent it, really, my email must not be working" excuses, file format incompatibilities, people emailing papers during the class sessions that they skipped so that they could finish them, etc.

The physical paper affords a lot of interactions as well - it's easy to gesture over a region of writing, circle it quickly, etc. Most digital versions of those gestures don't work (I could imagine - maybe - some of them working on a pad or tablet, but that's a stretch.) HCI research, trying to identify why an automation effort failed, observed the importance of physical writing in the care of hospital patients noted how much information was stored in the materials. Nurses could identify authors immediately from handwriting; density of writing often cued the dynamics of care; annotations connected writing to clarify the treatment plan, etc.

The biggest reason, however, is that I don't want to have to sit in an office to read and grade dozens of papers. I want to be able to do it on a plane, a train, a bus, on the beach, etc.

(Wait a bit) and try an eBook that supports annotations using a touch screen & stylus - e.g. an iRex one. You can bring *every* paper anyone has made with you instead, and be able to read comfortably as well. What I cannot understand is how you can accept only paper copies. Are there contributions so uninteresting that you don't want to store or index them somewhere?

I wonder how much money they waste on email storage and bandwidth costs by sending HTML mail instead of plain text too.

Haha haha ha haaa... wait, were you serious?
You know if people can't apply some simple formatting in the email reliably, they're just going to attach Word.docs (even more than they do already >:(). How much space do you think that will waste. Go back to using gopher if you don't like the web, same idea.

Secondly of all, give the students access to community laser printers. We're talking about pennies per page versus small fractions of pennies per page to print (i.e. 10 cents versus 0.001 cents)

Thirdly, switch over to re manufactured inks and toners. If the students are aware that they can buy aftermarket inks and toners, there's another 50% savings off the top (AND it's "green"). There are good companies and there are bad companies. Find someone local. Its supports the nearby economy. If you have problems, you don't have to ship something back to China.

[disclaimer: I work in the reman industry. I'm biased. Lasers tend to be more reliable than reman'd inks. With lasers, you can disassemble everything and replace the parts. With inkjets, it's more like an artform. If the electronics fail (which they often do), the cart is SOL]

Student printing largely pays for itself through the printing fees charged to the students. I am sure the UWGB is advocating to their students to make the font change, but that is largely a secondary issue. What they are probably talking about here is printing done by faculty and staff, where the local IT department picks up the cost of ink/toner.

And I think your measurement of the cost for lasers is a couple of orders of magnitude off. It is still much cheaper than ink-jet, but not that much cheaper.

1. The cheapest way: Drill and Fill. A company takes an empty laser cartridge and either splits it in half with a saw or drills a hole in it. They pour in toner, seal up the hole, and sell the cartridge. This produces a low cost, crappy cartridge. These will fail mid-stream, produce crap output, and possibly will leak.

Just curious, how much does one of your re-manufactured cartridges cost?

I was looking for a toner cartridge recently (MLT-D108S specifically) and found out that the re-manufacturing service in my city were simply too expensive compared new cartridge. The cheapest quote I got was $60, which is significantly more than the $45 price of a brand new cartridge on eBay. Not to mentioned I would have spend the time to take two trips to the store versus waiting for the cartridge to arrive at my doorsteps.

Depends on your idea of 'better'. As a decorative header/ display/ advertising font, some could say it looks much nicer. However, as just a standard reading font it is very wide and hard to read. They will probably end up using more paper and reducing readability.

I'm actually glad it fills up more space on the page, because it means I can write short papers again instead of having to drone on and on (or repeat myself) in the text to meet the length requirement after I met the requirements for the paper itself 4 pages ago.

I've got a better idea - move all email to Twitter: You only get 140 characters. Period. The only other thing better would be to route all emails to/dev/null but I don't think you can do that on a Windows box.

Let's hope they're using a really small font size. Cause those holes are really distracting in the Wikipedia example. The main advantage to reading from paper is faster reading speed (and arguably, less eyestrain), but if you're constantly distracted by the weird font, you'll lose that. Of course, using a small font size in the first place would save more ink (and more paper, due to more words per page) than a gimmicky font.

4 ) In order to optimise the legibility of the printed text, we have set an Ecoprint range. Only text up to a particular point size – generally 11 points - is printed in the Ecofont font. Larger text is printed in the normal font.

Because they would actually need to install this font/software. They can easily switch fonts and assume that everybody has Century Gothic as it's already widely installed. The additional IT overhead probably don't justify the impact on savings.

First, it's ugly. I mean really, helvetic'ish ugly. Second, the holes haven't been designed well - there's a high variability in color tone between the characters that gives an astigmatic dazzle effect and that make the text very fatiguing to read. Third, it doesn't scale well - magnifying by 20% increases the visibility of these flaws.

While I agree that printing emails is stupid, the idea of changing defaults to reduce ink and toner usage is rather smart. At my company, they changed the default Powerpoint template to one that would save on printing costs. Again, people shouldn't be printing them out in the first place, but the fact is that they do, and this will save money.

Google for Arial and Century Gothic. The former is clearl ment for reading, the latter for presentation. Arial is easy to read because it has enough "squiggles" for the brain to distinguish letters at rapid pace. Century gothic looks very nice and I would recommend it any day for BIG Headlines Buy This Car Now - type things, never for something you are supposed to be actually reading for prolonged time.

Then again, who the hell send an email over 50 words these days? So, *shrug*

There was a/. a couple of years ago about a company that release "ink saving" fonts that had holes in them - micro-dots in the black area of each letter, designed to be invisible to the naked eye, yet indistinguishable from the regular fonts.

STOP PRINTING EVERY FUCKING THING THAT POPS UP ON THEIR SCREEN. Dear God, I hate this at school where every term each student gets a printed syllabus from every professor, and then also has to print every assignment before turning it it. Why can't that all be done electronically? And at work, we have a MS SQL Reporting Server where you can look at all the reports you want via a web browser and/or export to Excel. BUT NO! Everyone has to print everything to look at it, and then they throw it in the tras

As I noted above, that font is really distracting for the reader. I'd be happier with using slightly smaller font and possibly 80% black density to achieve a similar effect, while using less paper (smaller fonts mean more content per page) and not having the weird choppy contrast those dots create.

Can I send drawings, images, graphed data or a complex formula (in an easily readable as hand-written format) as part of a text email. I don't think so. I use HTML email specifically because it allows all of the above to be embedded. Otherwise half the email I send would have to contain one or more attachments. So which do you prefer someone send: An attached Excel spreadsheet containing macros or an embedded graph of the data?

almost make me not so pissed off that that gas was only $3.19 a gallon by my house today.

Except most people use gasoline in gallons and printer ink in milliliters. I've definitely not used anywhere near a gallon of ink in my life so far (and would be shocked if I use a gallon of ink during my entire life), whereas I know I've spent over $10,000 in gas.